


every single day

by temerity (forsanethaec)



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Domesticity, Established Relationship, Fluff, Football | Soccer, Future Fic, M/M, Post-Band, Recreational Drug Use, Travel, non-au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-06 18:03:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4231497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsanethaec/pseuds/temerity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five years after One Direction, Louis takes Niall on a trip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	every single day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SolariaLunar21](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolariaLunar21/gifts).



> mods, i love you, and now that this is finally finished you have my permission to kill me. thanks to S for cheerleading and helping me pick a title -- it's from thinking out loud by ed -- and to L for the quickie beta and the gift of your tears. xo

Louis comes home to an empty house more often than not. It's not that he expects Niall to be there and then he isn't; it's normal, not to overlap, but still the kitchen feels cavernous and slightly haunted whenever Niall's not filling it up with cooking experiments and music and loud laughter, like the place was vacated only moments before Louis arrived.

It's nice, though, not to worry about that; he opens a beer and eats whatever leftovers he can find in the fridge, old takeaway, usually, or gets something new – all the takeaway in that fridge is his doing. He's not bad at cooking nowadays, but Niall's better, so fuck it. Then if it's still light out, if it's summer, he sits on the back deck and reads his emails and listens to people's reels and waits. 

He can get a lot of work done in that space, actually – 78 Productions itself is always a disaster zone of harried interns and ringing phones and meetings he doesn't remember allowing his PA to schedule, people he has to smile for and act like they can tell him shit about how to run his company just because he's only 29, as if that's an age you can put an “only” in front of, and somehow it's as though he was in One Direction yesterday, like that didn't give way to this forever ago, and you have to at least act like a professional when you're a grown-up if you ever want to get anything done. He waits until they walk out, and whatever they'd wanted him to do, he usually sets about doing the opposite.

But at home it's quiet, the back garden, a football come to rest in the middle of the grass if he wants to stretch his legs. He listens to the latest demos Liam's sent him, stuff that's just between them, that probably won't ever see the light of day, calls to offer rude and unsolicited opinions followed by actual constructive criticism and promises to get him in the studio soon. Reads long and entirely pointless email updates from Harry and snorts and marks them as unread to address later. Texts his sisters while faffing around the house avoiding tidying.

By the time Niall gets home he's bored enough to feign annoyance. He gets into character while he hears Niall rattling around in the kitchen, getting a beer of his own. Then the soft _shhck_ of the patio door sliding open, and Niall stepping through in slacks and a dress shirt, sleeves rolled up just below his elbows, his hair styled flat like he keeps it these days, a healthy shadow of stubble on his jaw. Louis is already standing, facing him, trying not to smile. “Look who finally decided to show up,” he says, hand on his hip. “Thought I was gonna be waiting all night for you. I feel like a bored housewife.”

Niall just smirks at him. "Did you do the washing up, then?"

"No," Louis says petulantly. Niall's smirk becomes a grin. They've been through this enough times that he doesn't point out the obvious flaws in the argument anymore – like that Louis gets home late just as often as Niall does, that Niall's been the one waiting up just as many times, and also that they have a housekeeper come twice a week.

“You could've come with me,” Niall points out. Louis frowns, deflating a little. They don't usually bring that bit up; too legitimate.

“Don't want to steal your thunder,” he says, shrugging. It makes Niall's expression grow warmer. He looks really good, and Louis doesn't wait for him to close the space between them like he would have once – he steps forward before Niall can, because he wants to be near him. Slides his hands around Niall's waist and pulls him in.

“You can steal my thunder any time,” Niall tells him, grinning, and Louis rolls his eyes and kisses him, kisses his teeth because he's still grinning. Niall smells like cologne and something a little boozy, probably whatever they had on tap at the gala he'd come from. That's how Niall passes most of his days: charity sport camps, benefits for same, invitationals to actually play with pros in between all that when he gets asked. Golf mostly. Sometimes football, and Louis does usually invite himself to join in those.

Niall doesn't have a regular a gig like Louis does still judging Be in the Band, which is between seasons at the moment but is as established as X-Factor or maybe even more – kids these days still love an ensemble act, they'd seen to that themselves. But Niall's on the telly about as much, wandering between friends' late night shows and any other bullshit he can invite himself to for laughs. It's not a bad life, what they have. It could have been a lot of other things.

“I'm sorry I didn't ask you,” Niall mumbles, close to Louis' mouth.

“Oh, shut up,” Louis says. “You know I never know if I'm actually gonna be free. If I want to be your date I'll ask _you_.”

It makes Niall laugh, his eyes going crinkly at the corners, pushed up by pink cheeks. Louis knows what he's thinking when he looks like that – _I can't believe I get to hear you say stuff like that every day._ He knows. He can't believe he gets to say it either.

*

It wasn't immediate, of course, all this. There'd been a couple bad years after the band, all this weird distance and feeling like everything he'd lined up to fall back on was massively insufficient. Like the whole rest of his life couldn't ever compare. He'd known it would be like that and knew he'd get over it and still it was hard to live through. Never knowing what was missing or if it was something wrong with him, feeling sad and unmoored and not knowing what else he could be.

He talked to the others less than he should have; threw himself headfirst into fucking off, at first, and then trying to get his million work projects off the ground, like a floundering post-grad. He was almost 26 and they'd been broken up more than a year when Niall called him on a long layover – they were all back to just flying first class, most of the time, would rather have fancy cars and homes to crash in all over the world than a private plane if not to share with three or four best mates – and Louis had laughed more than he'd done in weeks. 

It was the first time they'd talked in a while, a couple of months at least, and how fucking weird that was, weirder than anything. They talked about that, exchanging _I miss you_ s that were true, and Louis kept smiling into breaks in the conversation, wondering at the warmth. Promises to see each other soon, honest ones, a drawn-out _you hang up first_ type of ending. All of it.

And after: the sudden quiet. And he could feel Niall in that empty space in his chest, the space that ached and kept him up at night. And he just knew.

It was probably a crisis but he doesn't really remember that now, only remembers the night he and Niall met up for dinner and drank wine and got papped and Louis walked him to the car with an arm around his waist, and Niall's expression was half bemusement, half thinly veiled panic. (Louis clipped some of those pictures from tabloids and presented them to Niall in a frame on their first Christmas together.) And he remembers back at his place, the lights all still off in the foyer, Niall clearly struggling to figure out how to ask if they'd just gone on a date when Louis plucked up seven years of repressed courage and kissed him. Just like that.

He was prepared to blame it on the wine if Niall pushed him away, to laugh it off and say something about his life falling apart and how he figured he'd give it a shot, what the hell, the honest truth. But Niall didn't push him away. He was 24 then, as old as Louis was when they split, and he slumped against Louis for one winded moment and then straightened up and kissed him back so hard that Louis started to laugh. And then they were both laughing, close to the point of tears, and they clutched at each other laughing and stumbled onto the nearest sofa and kissed there for what felt like hours.

 _Never leave me again_ , Louis remembers thinking, even though they'd all left each other in nearly equal measures. But with Niall it wasn't like the others. With the others the phone was enough, or the occasional joyful public reunion and work collaboration, the gentle constancy of text messaging and knowing there was always someone out there who felt the same way. Louis figured that out. But with Niall he needed to see it -- needed him there, like he'd always been before. He'd been at the center of that light for so long that he'd forgotten how to be in the dark. 

Absence and growing fonder, and not knowing what you've got and all that. Louis maintains that he was always as fond of Niall as he is now, that he was just an idiot, basically. But the backstory doesn't really matter all these years down the road.

*

There's a long stretch where, every day for 10 days, they don't see each other until one of them's crawling into bed in the middle of the night, whispering an apology, a kiss on the cheek, back to sleep. Barely talking, not for lack of wanting to, feeling stretched thin. The Saturday after that they wake up together in the mid-morning, thick white light already filling the room, and Louis sits up blinking and looks at Niall snuffling around in the sheets and says, "We should take a trip." 

And it's not, anymore, like when they were younger and felt despite their obligations that they could get away with anything -- Louis has responsibilities now, ones he legitimately cares about, and he's a mentor and all that so it doesn't do to get chucked out of hotels for trespassing and banned from entire countries for smoking weed and all that good shit they used to do on tour. And so he takes the time to clear his schedule, check things off the to-do list his PA gives him when he prompts her for unfinished business that needs doing, before he takes off with Niall for two weeks. 

They fly together to Spain -- on a Sony plane, this time, because Louis didn't have the patience for buying last-minute commercial tickets. Niall doesn't know where they're going when they touch down. He asks when they're in the car, a rented Range Rover with Louis in the driver's seat, in a tone that suggests he already knows he's not going to get an answer but feels a need to try. Louis bares his teeth in a sly smile and shakes his head. 

"I could blindfold you, if you'd rather," he adds mildly, and Niall just grins, leans his seat back and opens the sunroof to the black night as Louis speeds off toward the city. 

It's almost midnight when they pull up to the hotel in Barcelona, and the streets are alive and glittering, and Louis loves Niall for following along gamely without asking questions when they dash upstairs to change like they're kids again and then burst out into the summer night, head for the first bar they see that doesn't appear to come with a high chance of being recognized. 

The late night starts with shots at the bar and Niall attracting a large circle of new Spanish friends who don't even ask them for selfies until the very end, and ends with the two of them ensconced at a corner table with a bottle of bloody Rioja staining Niall's mouth, the picked-over remnants of a cheese board and olives and a pot of mussels with good bread spread out between them, and Louis feels entirely overwhelmed by the number of things he adores about this -- that they can go out together, that it's been long enough to mostly stop being tabloid fodder, the way it was when Louis was 26 and Niall was 25 and they came out together. And that Niall's the same effusive, magnetic kid he always was, full of life and joy, up for anything. The way he smiles at Louis, lowers his eyes and laughs in the low candlelight of this random bar in Spain at two in the morning. How he hasn't asked; that he's content with the idea that this is the vacation, playing like they're invisible together doing nothing abroad, living with it when they're not. 

"Don't you want to know what we're doing in Barcelona?" Louis asks across the table, voice a little raised over the noise, reaching for Niall's hand and playing with his fingers.

"I figured you'd tell me when you wanted," Niall says. "Or ask me to ask." He laughs. "So?"

Louis levels a haughty look at him that's ruined when he can't bite back a smile. "So," he says, pouring half the last of the wine into his glass with a thick splash. "You know Barca's playing tomorrow."

"Yeah," Niall says, leaning back. Louis watches the way he sticks his free hand under his bicep across his chest, like he always used to. They've both filled out, broader in the chest, but some things never change. "Are we going?"

"Thought we might, like, play fans," Louis says. "Sit in the stands and all. Just. Do it normal, y'know?" 

Niall grins sidelong. His teeth are ashy with the wine, and Louis loves him. It's the liquor and the hot air coming in from the open front of the bar and the candlelight and his heart just swoops in his chest every time he looks at Niall, every time, still. How it did before he knew what it meant. Before they said it out loud. 

"Normal," Niall pronounces. "Okay. Sure."

"Like you always used to do when you went to see, like, Derby." He takes a sip of his wine, licking his lips and waving the hand that's not holding Niall's as he tries to form the words. "And tennis and all that."

"I know." Niall nods. His eyes haven't left Louis' face since the last time he started laughing, and Louis is still holding onto his hand. He turns his hand over, laces their fingers, palms together. 

"I feel like we're on our honeymoon," Niall says. He's already blushy from drinking but he goes pinker when he says it. 

"Alright." Louis smiles, leaves it at that. A strange conversation to have at volume in a strange bar. This morning they were in London scrambling to get their work settled before they flew out. Holidays are strange like that. The first night.

It finds them an hour later breathless in hotel sheets, coming down, more tired now than anything. Louis kisses Niall on the corner of his mouth, strokes his hip while his breathing settles. They're sweaty and they smell like sex and the windows are open, because that's just what you do when you stay in a gorgeous hotel decorated in rich warm tones with billowy white curtains and the lights off on a breezy summer night. 

Niall gazes up at the ceiling, his perfect mouth open, kissed dark pink. Louis kisses his shoulder and smirks to himself for being the king of trip planning forever. 

"Why'd we do this now?" Niall asks, turning on his side. The question registers with Louis slowly. Niall has a way of bringing something like that to the table with no preamble, when you least expect it. Louis thinks about how to answer, face mushed into the same pillow Niall's head is on.

"Felt like we hadn't seen each other in forever," he says. His voice is soft and scratchy with the end of the night. "I got tired of it. Wanted to take you somewhere."

"You spoil me," Niall murmurs. His eyes are closed, but Louis kisses his mouth anyway. 

"'S good to see you," Niall says against his lips after a while. Louis laughs. 

"You too, lad." And he lets Niall curl up against his back before he shuts his eyes. Little spoon like he never let anyone else make him before, like he'll never need anyone else making him again. 

*

They watch the Barca game the next day, low down in the stands with plastic cups of beer in their hands and the late summer sun on their faces. It's a good day, to the point where Louis isn't even fussed about obliging the jumbotrons with a wave and a peck on the lips for Niall when they're spotted. He might be imagining the cheer that goes up then, but it feels good either way, good like knowing for sure, that warmth in his chest. 

Niall grins at him when the camera moves off. There are people smiling at them all around, some snapping pictures, but Niall doesn't have eyes for anyone else. 

"Remember when we came here? When--"

"Yeah," Louis says, sipping his Stella. "Getting our kits on in that locker room."

"That was one of the best days," Niall says dreamily.

"Really? Of all of 'em? I'd have thought--"

"There were a lot of best days," Niall says. "Still are." 

Louis shakes his head, smiling into the lip of his cup. Keeps his eyes on the field when Niall nudges his shoulder with his own.

"I liked any day I got to hang out with Louis Tomlinson," Niall says.

 _I was in love with you even then. It took you so long to realize._ Louis hears him saying it, even if he doesn't mean to, even if it's not like that at all. It was. It is. 

"I know you did," he says, and he kisses Niall on the cheek and then the mouth again, not for the cameras, just to make sure. 

*

Niall puts it together as soon as they get to Milan. 

"Oh my god, Louis," he says, the color high in his cheeks. "It's all gonna be tour stops, innit." 

"Maybe," Louis says. They're marching into San Siro as he says it, and it takes a lot to keep his head held high, eyes forward, breezily ignoring Niall's laughter beside him. 

They're early to the AC Milan game and they put their feet up on the backs of the seats in front of them while the stadium fills in around them. 

"It was a great gig," Niall says after a while. It's loud in the stadium even with most of the seats still empty, but Niall's quiet voice carries underneath the noise. Louis looks around.

"I remember."

"They did that thing," Niall says, waving his hands at all the seats. 

"With the -- yeah. With the cards." 

Niall's quiet again, and Louis studies his profile. It's taken him years to understand how to read Niall, to figure out what he's thinking when in the past he would have just defaulted to leaving him alone. 

"So weird how that was just -- like, something we did for a few years."

"Six years. Almost." 

"But you know what I mean? Just --" Niall makes bookends in the air with his hands. 

Louis does know. That it all happened, and ended, and is in the past. Everything except for this. 

"Is it weird to be back at all these places?" Louis asks. "We can go do something else, I mean, there's more to life and Portugal than the place we filmed a bloody concert DVD, like, six years ago." 

It makes Niall laugh. "No, it's not. It's -- it's not bad, just." He frowns, twisting his mouth around. "It makes me miss it, but it's kinda nice. Nostalgia, like."

"Yeah. God, six years." It's catching up with him. "I'm gonna be thirty this winter," he mutters. Niall throws an arm around his shoulders. 

"Better have fun now while you still can, then, eh?" He jostles Louis around until he smiles. "And I don't want you to worry, I'm already making all the arrangements to have you put you in a home and taken care of 'til we need to wheel you out for the reunion. Only the best."

Louis grins, hunching over, trembling his hands on the side of his beer. "Such a gentleman," he says in his best quavering old weirdo voice, and Niall throws his head back laughing.

*

It's Porto next, then FC Copenhagen at Parken in Denmark, the happy exhaustion of travel, of feeling so far away from work and obligations they've forgotten about going back. Louis only checks his email a few times a day, then less after Niall smacks his phone out of his hand at their hotel one morning and tackles him back into bed. 

Then Amsterdam, where they lie on chaises on the balcony of their hotel suite passing fat store-bought joints back and forth, until Louis is floating so high he can barely stand to straddle Niall's hips. Niall takes hold of his waist, grins blearily up at him. They don't get stoned half as often as they did when they were younger anymore, but for Louis it's still one of the best feelings. Better as he leans in to nose along Niall's hairline, kiss his temple and the corner of his mouth. He rides Niall's thigh aimlessly for a while until Niall groans and dislodges him, drags him inside and into the real bed. They're slow with it, wasting the afternoon instead of going out and seeing the same things they saw back then.

"I don't want this to be about, like, the past, you know?" Louis says abruptly in the middle of it, when they're both just tangled up kissing, half-hard, half-naked, not going anywhere with it. It's just occurred to him. Niall kicks at the sheets around his ankles, laughs his husky stoned laugh into Louis' neck. 

"What?"

Louis inhales, filling his heavy lungs, tries to bring Niall's face into focus. "I wanted -- I wanna bring you all these places just, just for us. For now. Not--" He gasps again when Niall gets a hand on him, pushes his shirt up with the other until Louis finally takes it off and loses it over the side of the mattress. 

"I know," Niall mumbles, lips at Louis' collarbone now. "S'okay." 

"Yeah," Louis says. He's really high. Closes his eyes and breathes shakily while Niall gets him hard again. "Fuck it." Reaches for him too. 

*

They leave the next night, a Tuesday, their second of the two weeks they've blocked out to spend away. Louis is riding a low-grade last-minute buzz behind the wheel, and Niall's checking emails in the passenger seat, tongue between his teeth as he types. Louis resists the urge to bat the phone out of his hand like a vengeful pet cat, smiling. 

"You never ask where we're going next," he says. 

Niall looks up, raising an eyebrow. "You always tell me before I have to," he says, grinning. "Kind of like this."

"Well, maybe I was gonna surprise you this time." 

"Well, then." Niall waits, tapping his phone against his thigh. Louis keeps driving, trying to school his features. 

They're a minute from the airport when he says, "You're sure you don't wanna know?" 

Niall snorts. "Only if you wanna tell me."

"Alrighty then." And he manages not to say anything else. They pull to a halt at the private terminal, where the company plane Louis has totally commandeered for this trip is hopefully awaiting their pleasure, and he leans across Niall to open his door for him. "After you."

Niall's smiling, but to himself, not at Louis -- and it's _more_ like that, hits Louis harder how good it feels to make him happy. To have gotten this right. There's an airport valet following behind them with their bags, so Louis breaks into a run to catch Niall up. Throws his arms around him from behind, both of them stumbling and laughing. Louis blows a raspberry on the back of his neck. Can't stop smiling. Fuck thirty. He's got this to keep him young.

*

Louis zonks out on the flight, sleeps through their brief touchdown in London and wakes at dawn to the plane skidding down onto the tarmac in Dublin. Niall's got his face pressed to the window, fogging it up with his breath. Louis reaches across the aisle of the little charter plane, brushes the back of Niall's arm with his fingertips, and Niall shifts but doesn't look away until they've come to a halt. It's quiet in the cabin, only the sound of the instruments powering down. 

Then Niall turns to look at him, pink light on the side of his face. It steals Louis' breath how intimate the moment is -- just the two of them, away from home. They've only had each other for days. For years. And Niall's got sleep lines from his airplane pillow on his cheek, his hair tousled and disordered, wearing a loose long-sleeved tee that might be Louis', doesn't matter. He looks at Louis like he would at the sunrise. With the kind of wonder you still feel at something you knew would be there, even if you had to wait. 

"Morning," Louis says, scratchy. It still gets his heart jumping when Niall looks at him like that, after all this time. 

Niall leans across the aisle and pulls him into a hug. He's heavy against Louis, feels like he might not have slept much.

"You've never been to Ireland with me before," he murmurs.

"Well," Louis points out. Doesn't bother finishing the contradiction. He gets it. 

*

They check into a hotel downtown and when Louis comes out of the loo, Niall's asleep on the couch, one leg off the side with his foot on the ground, an arm thrown over his eyes to block out the light from the open curtains. Louis smiles. He creeps out of the room with his phone and his room key in his pocket, spends twenty minutes or so in the lobby finalizing some plans. Chats to Liam on the phone about it so there's no going back, feeling warm and shivery all over at the same time. 

The shower's running when he gets back to the room, Niall's clothes folded on the couch next to his bag. Louis shrugs, strips off and opens the bathroom door.

Niall's singing in the shower, an old Kodaline tune. Louis pulls the curtain aside, laughing when Niall startles comically as he's wont to do, then folds up a towel and tosses it into the tub under the spray, climbs in and gets on his knees. 

And when he tries to pick a favorite part -- all day, something to latch onto, he can't do it. He loves watching Niall tidy both their things up in their shared room and leave a careful tip for the housekeeping, loves that they wouldn't have to worry about money even if they did have to worry about money because they're a proper couple now, and all the financing comes out in the wash. They've even got some shared accounts -- the house, airline miles, whatever. 

They go for a late breakfast (a full English and a full Irish, some things never reconciled) and sit at a table outside, people-watching and arguing about what kind of dog they'd get, and if it's worth having a dog if neither of them are ever home to take care of it, and could it hang out at Louis' office, and God forbid they ever have kids. And it's not a shock to talk about that, and not exactly a joke, either -- it's just this, taking its time. The long view. Louis can't stop smiling. 

"You're cheerful," Niall notices. He steals the remnants of Louis' beans with a deft fork across the table. 

"I'm on holiday," Louis says. "With my favorite boy." 

Niall blushes. "Favorite adult," he corrects. He can't do lofty dismissal like Louis can, though, keeps grinning through it. 

"Favorite 28-year-old," Louis says, "whatever that makes you." 

Niall nods like this is fair and true, and it's Louis' turn to laugh. "C'mon," he says. "Show me Dublin." 

"What's the plan?"

"Croker tonight. But we've got time to kill. Anything you want."

"Louis," Niall says. "This trip is for both of us, y'know. It's not my birthday." 

"In, like, a month."

"So." 

"So nothing. It's just me being a lazy arse, innit? Tricking you into making all the decisions for me."

"And who's paying for all the hotels?"

Louis shrugs, taking a delicate sip of his coffee. "You've gotten some of the meals. Whatever, we'll tally it out when we get home, yeah? C'mon, Nialler, let's go exploring." 

So they do. Couples' selfies at Trinity, and they decide on a Jameson tour over Guinness because Louis is a wimp when it comes to stouts, and Niall buys him a new watch on Henry Street. They criss-cross the river, stopping for drinks and a bite to eat at random, taking photos with a few people but not that many. Something about the Irish air is just gorgeous on Niall -- has him all glowy like rose gold as they walk through square after square with that lush green feeling, wet stone, grey skies cut with blue. Louis likes following, likes listening to Niall play tour guide. He learned from him how just to watch.

"What's at Croker tonight, anyway?" 

"GAA exhibition match," Louis says, trying for easy, but it sounds like bullshit and there's nothing he can do about it. Niall could easily check the schedule to see there's nothing on at Croke today, and probably has done. But he doesn't push it, just grins and shakes his head at Louis and carries on not asking. 

*

It's just before dusk when they're let into the empty stadium, the sky going pink and lavender above them, the air cooling down. Niall's visibly biting his tongue now, and Louis doesn't even have an excuse anymore, just leads him down a corridor to where the stage had been. Their escort peels off, smiling at Louis, and then it's just the two of them, walking out onto the pitch.

Louis stops after they're past the goal line, watching Niall wander further out, his mouth open, face upturned to the stands. 

"So weird to be in here when it's all deserted, like," he says. "I literally haven't been back since -- God, 2014?"

"I know," Louis says. His heart is hammering in his chest, lower lip going ragged between his teeth as he waits for Niall to stop staring around and look back at him. 

"Loved those gigs," Niall's muttering. "That was such an amazing fucking time." He's in his own world, and Louis lets him go a moment longer before he steps forward to close the distance between them. 

"Niall," he says softly. Niall turns, and Louis gets down on one knee. 

"Figured I ought to be the one to do this, considering your knee and all," he says, gesturing. His voice is scratchy, and he clears his throat. Niall's frozen where he stands, hands at his sides, staring down at Louis. He opens his mouth, but Louis takes a deep breath and cuts him off. 

"Nialler," he says again, with more certainty. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the ring box there. 

"Jesus Christ, Louis," Niall says in a rush. His hands rise jerkily to his open mouth like he doesn't know what to do with them. 

"So, we've only been dating for three years--" Louis starts.

"Only."

"Niall, please." Louis can't help grinning. He clutches the ring box in both hands on top of his thigh. "We've been dating three years, _but_ we've been together in one way or another for a lot longer. And... alright." He practiced this, if he's honest, but it still feels new. "You make me happy every day, and you make me laugh, and -- and you make me a better person, and I just feel so lucky to get to have that now. And -- I never want it to stop. I just want it to go on forever, Niall. And it can. And --" 

He's crying now, can't help it, his laughter a weak, wet sound as Niall starts to cry too, chanting a steady stream of _oh my god jesus christ jesus fucking christ_ under his breath. The turf of the field is biting into his knee through his jeans, and the floodlights are on around Niall above him. Eighty thousand empty seats, and the memories, and everything they haven't done yet an audience to this. 

"I do want to spend the rest of my life with you like this, Niall," Louis picks up finally, blinking. Hands occupied so he can't wipe his face, and he tastes salt in the corner of his mouth when he smiles. He opens the box; a simple silver band; holds it up. "Marry me?"

"Jesus, Louis," Niall repeats, "of course, of course I will, Christ, get up," and he pulls Louis to his feet by the elbows and kisses him, hands on his cheeks. Louis' head is spinning, a rush in his ears, and he could swear it's the ghost of the screaming crowd in another lifetime, when this was waiting to begin. He kisses Niall back, holds onto him while Niall laugh-cries into his shoulder, both of them trembling.

"Good," he says finally, pulling back, "good, 'cause it cost a fortune to rent out the stadium."

"You didn't."

He snorts. "Nah, would've been good though, wouldn't it? There's football on here tomorrow, we can come back." He takes Niall's hand as he says it all, bowled over by the ease of this. Slips the ring onto his finger.

"Do you have one as well?" Niall asks. "How's -- Jesus. We just got engaged." He can't keep the grin off his face, blotchy pink, clutching at Louis. 

"I have a matching one back home. I think we're meant to upgrade them to gold when we actually seal the deal."

"Are you making that up?"

"Well… kind of. But I wanted to surprise you." 

"You did," Niall says, staring down at the ring, twisting it around his finger. "I knew something had to be up, but I couldn't for the life of me think what." He can barely get the words out, he's grinning so broadly. Louis can't take his eyes off him. 

Niall shakes his head, touches Louis' cheek, looking into his eyes. Then he starts nodding. 

"Yes," he says, softly. 

There's a rustling around on one of the sidelines, and the photographer Louis had planted there pokes her head out from behind a maintenance door. 

"Ready for a close-up, guys?" she asks. Niall's eyebrows shoot up his forehead. 

"She's with me," Louis tells him. "Sure, c'mon." The photog trots over, looking as pleased as Louis feels while Niall laughs at the whole thing.

"We're a mess," he tells her. "Hope you can work some magic."

"I'll try," she says, smiling. Louis rolls his eyes. 

The picture they hang onto in the end, the one they use to announce it and all that, is one of the outtakes -- Niall's showing the ring to the camera, but he's looking at Louis, smiling like it's funny and like he's so, so in love. It's a familiar expression, one Louis has known for years, except now it's a love like it knows it matters, and will keep mattering. Hopeful. He likes the photo best because he's looking at Niall the same way.


End file.
